VERSATILE VIEWER

Like other visions of the future, the paperless office is taking much longer than anyone expected. The heaps of paper on office desks just don’t seem to get any smaller. On a brighter note, some books – especially technical documentation – are now available in electronic format, alternatively or exclusively, as the case may be. Documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF) [2], an Adobe [1] development, look the same no matter what operating system you use, and this means extending genuine cross-platform compatibility to document design.

In the world of Unix and Linux, other formats such as PostScript and DVI play important roles. There are any number of Linux-based document viewers. Gnome now includes Evince (Figure 1) [3], a useful all-rounder, as the standard viewer for these file types. Evince can also handle graphic formats such as TIFF and DjVu, which are typically the result of scanning text documents.